Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [92]
A veteran of the late-century Indian Wars, General Bell did not invent the counterinsurgency tactic of reconcentration: the forcible removal of civilians from hostile areas into militarized towns in order to isolate guerillas from their base of support. The history of U.S.-Indian policy had been, in a sense, one long process of forcible removal. More recently, European armies had resorted to this specific tactic in colonial wars against indigenous, nonwhite populations. The Spanish general Valeriano Weyler’s brutal reconcentration campaign in Cuba during 1896–98 had failed to crush the independence movement, but it had caused the deaths of an estimated 100,000 Cubans and tilted American public opinion toward war. In 1900, the young Winston Churchill touted his nation’s forced reconcentration of rural South Africans in the Boer War. Still, the severity of the U.S. Army’s “concentration camps,” as some newspapers referred to them, shocked the American public. General Bell and his superiors defended the camps as a legal and necessary measure to protect the population from bandits and guerrillas. But within the United States the policy strengthened opposition to the war.100
Wherever it was undertaken, forced population concentration caused epidemics. In the British concentration camps for Boers and Blacks in South Africa, 42,000 civilians died. Public revelations of the policy’s human cost weakened public support for imperialism in England. Like rural people across the Philippine archipelago, the Batanguenos had already suffered mightily in recent years. The effects of the two successive wars—the collapse of the Spanish health system, the movement of troops about the provinces, the destruction of draft animals by rinderpest, and the dislocation and impoverishment of the rural population—intensified the health crisis that had been ongoing for some years. These events elevated the Filipinos’ susceptibility to disease while increasing their exposure to pathogens.101
The Batangas reconcentration zones seethed with disease and death. One Army officer described the camp he commanded as “some suburb of hell.” Vampire bats circled overhead awaiting the day’s supply of corpses. Thrown together with thousands of desperate strangers in the filthy zones, the Batanguenos suffered outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, and smallpox. With so many U.S. soldiers living in the camps, something had to be done.102
And so as U.S. infantrymen hunted down and killed General Malvar’s guerrillas in the coastal flatlands and rolling hills of Batangas, Army doctors enforced vaccination in the camps. The Army hired eighty Filipino vaccinators. According to the official “Directions for Vaccination of Natives,” sent in January 1902 to all station commanders in Batangas by Army Chief Surgeon William Stephenson, the vaccinators moved in pairs through the teeming reconcentration camps, each accompanied by an American soldier. As the vaccinating party entered the crowded huts and houses, they drove the inhabitants toward the rear walls. The vaccinators set to work at the doorway, scraping the arms of the men, women, and children as they were led, one by one, into the light. Only those showing recognizable pockmarks were exempt. General Bell himself took a special interest in the minute details of the compulsory vaccination effort. “It can easily be understood by all how serious the difficulty and detrimental to our plan